Google VP has Ohio's students on his mind

DAVOS, Switzerland - Meet Sebastian Thrun, a man who represents a unique component of the "German" investment Gov. John Kasich is seeking for Ohio this week at the World Economic Forum.

Joe Vardon, The Columbus Dispatch

DAVOS, Switzerland — Meet Sebastian Thrun, a man who represents a unique component of the “ German” investment Gov. John Kasich is seeking for Ohio this week at the World Economic Forum.

Thrun, 45, was born in Germany but lives in California. The kind of investment he wants to make in Ohio isn’t your average build-a-factory development.

Rather, Thrun is a for-profit higher-education entrepreneur, and he says his model could lower college-remediation course rates, reduce costs to students, shrink the time it takes to graduate college and, ultimately, better align workers’ skills with employers’ needs.

“(Remediation) is a national disaster, and it’s only getting worse from the student’s perspective,” said Thrun, a Google vice president who’s attending the Forum this week to discuss his efforts to build a self-driving automobile. He and Kasich were scheduled to meet in Davos yesterday — Kasich’s first day at the four-day conference — but a scheduling conflict forced a postponement.

“Many remediation courses, like mathematics, are not taught well in the classroom,” Thrun said. “ The students are paying for the classes but aren’t getting credit, and four-year degrees take six years to achieve.”

Thrun has a background in higher education — teaching at both Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities. Kasich is interested in bringing Thrun’s model to Ohio.

Kasich often is critical of how long it takes Ohio college students to graduate. About 61 percent who enrolled in 2005 ended up graduating six years later. Also, about 41 percent who graduate from a public high school in Ohio take at least one remedial course when they enroll in one of the state’s two- or four-year public colleges.

Thrun flew to Ohio to meet with Kasich on Jan. 14 at the urging of Mark Kvamme, the former JobsOhio chief and Kasich confidant who came to know Thrun well when Kvamme was working as a venture capitalist in California.

But what a Kasich-Thrun partnership would look like remains to be seen, in part because both men say they need to meet again to chart a path.

Thrun’s for-profit Californian startup called Udacity offers inexpensive online remediation courses, college introductory courses and IT courses for people looking for jobs in the industry. He worked with Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown and San Jose State University on the online remedial and introductory course components.

Classes were offered for $150, far cheaper than what four-year schools charge, and the students get college credit for taking them. Thrun’s partnership with Brown could be a model for anything he pursues with Kasich.

Kasich, at this point, seems more interested in the remediation component than the IT worker training Udacity offers. But the Republican governor has also developed trust with Ohio’s higher-education leaders who’ve developed plans to reduce remediation-course participation rates and boost four-year graduation rates.

Kasich said he doesn’t want to “get out ahead” of those college presidents and will discuss with them how Thrun’s model might be implemented in Ohio.

“He’s a big thinker,” Kasich said of Thrun. “We’re going to explore ways in which we can work together. And I told him (on Jan. 14) we’re not going to hold him up on these things, that we would get moving on it. And I am excited about the possibility of online remedial education.”